By CAROL VOGEL

Published: April 27, 2005

Sitting in his small SoHo office after returning from Russia recently, Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Museum, was flashing images, graphs and numbers from a laptop onto a flat-screen television. He was consumed by what he had seen in Russia, where he met with officials from the Kremlin Museum, as well as the deputy minister of culture, to negotiate loans for ''Russia!,'' a major exhibition that will fill the entire Fifth Avenue Guggenheim Museum when it opens in September.

He described the wide range of treasures he hoped to borrow and the exhibition's enormous cost: about $4 million, approximately what the Metropolitan Museum of Art spent to mount its blockbuster Byzantium exhibition last year. He said $2 million of the show's cost was being paid by the charitable foundation run by Vladimir Potanin, president and chairman of one of the largest private Russian conglomerates and a member of the Guggenheim board. Mr. Krens was fascinated by the freewheeling spirit of Russia's new generation of capitalists.

''Russia in the 21st century has the largest concentration of natural resources around the world,'' Mr. Krens said. ''I've never felt such a concentration of money. It's a boom town,'' he said of Moscow, ''as close to Las Vegas as anything I've seen. The entrepreneurial energy is enormous.''

A few weeks ago, three months after triumphing in a ''him or me'' showdown with Peter B. Lewis, then the Guggenheim chairman, who demanded he stay focused on New York, the unchastened Mr. Krens took off for Mexico City with a delegation of board members, including the new chairman and president. Their purpose was to meet with President Vicente Fox about a possible Guggenheim satellite in Guadalajara. The museum is also in serious talks with Singapore.

Such developments were at the heart of Mr. Lewis's objections and subsequent resignation in January. Mr. Lewis, the museum's biggest benefactor (during his 11 years on the board, he gave the Guggenheim about $77 million, nearly four times as much as any other board member in the museum's history), walked away, saying the museum should concentrate on housekeeping at home rather than opening more Guggenheims around the world.

But Mr. Krens, 58, whose reputation as a motorcycle-mad, globe-trotting visionary unconcerned about costs has made him the talk of the art world, doesn't seem much changed since that three-hour meeting in January. Asked where his priorities are now -- home or abroad -- he said, ''Both.''

The key to his business plan is hiring big-name architects to design buildings that will become tourist destinations in themselves, like the Guggenheim's Frank Lloyd Wright building on Fifth Avenue or its Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. And though the museum's new leaders express caution about the budget, they share Mr. Krens's vision.

At a cocktail party last week at the Four Seasons restaurant to celebrate the museum's new chairman, William L. Mack, a real estate developer, and its first female president, Jennifer Stockman, Ms. Stockman talked of ''bringing art and culture to cities around the world.''

''We are at a pivotal juncture to make a great institution even greater,'' Ms. Stockman said.

Mr. Mack, the founder of Apollo Real Estate Advisers and chairman of the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation, a real estate investment trust, stressed that he had created a more active board whose priorities were ''budgetary responsibility, building the endowment and promoting education.''

Still, he emphasized that the Guggenheim was and always would be an international presence: ''It is an international museum whose home is in New York.''

Today's board is driven by leading members of New York's real estate world who share Mr. Krens's dreams of empire building. Besides Mr. Mack, one of five trustees who joined the board two years ago, they include Stephen M. Ross, founder and chief executive of the Related Companies, and Robert C. Baker, the chairman and chief executive of Purchase, a New York-based national realty and development corporation. Ms. Stockman is president of Stockman & Associates, consultants specializing in technology.

No one questions the success of the Guggenheim Bilbao, which has been attracting more than 900,000 visitors a year since it opened in 1997, or even the recently expanded Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, which attracted 350,000 last year, 50,000 more than in 2003.

But some board members -- a defeated minority who decline to be quoted but say they believe the success of these satellites are exceptions -- argue that the Guggenheim has no business trying to spread its name any further when there is so much work to be done at home.

Attendance at the Guggenheim plummeted after 9/11, as it did at all museums in New York City. But for the Guggenheim, the drop was particularly serious. Because so many of its visitors are tourists who come especially to see the building, a month after 9/11, admissions were down almost 60 percent, and revenue was about half of what it was supposed to be. About one-fifth of its staff had been laid off. It also was also forced to delay the opening of its branch in Las Vegas, and when it did open, only one portion survived: the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, which is jointly run with the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, and plans its exhibitions in collaboration with the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The Guggenheim's SoHo branch also closed in 2001.

Slowly, the museum has been making its way back, partly through the success of its satellites, which also include a Guggenheim in Berlin.